Sunday 4th January will be the 200th anniversary of the birth of Louis Braille (see also Vision Australia release)
. Louis Braille was born in Coupvray, 25 miles from Paris. As a small child he was blinded by a mishap in his father’s workshop. Braille was inspired by the ‘night writing’ system of raised dots and dashes invented by one of Napoleon’s officers to help soldiers pass messages in the darkness. This system was too complex and Braille set out to simplify it.
Helen Keller summed up Braille’s contribution in a speech she gave at the Sorbonne to mark the centennial of his death:
On behalf of the blind people of the world, I thank you from the bottom of my heart for having generously recognized the pride and efforts of all those who refuse to succumb to their limitations. In our way, we, the blind, are as indebted to Louis Braille as mankind is to Gutenberg. It is true that the dot system is very different from ordinary print, but these raised letters are, under our fingers, precious seeds from which has grown our intellectual harvest. Without the braille dot system, how incomplete and chaotic our education would be! The dismal doors of frustration would shut us out from the untold treasures of literature, philosophy and science. But, like a magic wand, the six dots of Louis Braille have resulted in schools where embossed books, like vessels, can transport us to ports of education, libraries and all the means of expression that assure our independence.
The Braille system is based on a cell of six dots which are either raised or not:
Braille uses a system of small raised dots that are read using the fingertips and can be used to represent everything from words to math and music. The reader’s fingers gently glide over paper that has been embossed with the braille code.
Braille is a binary system, one of just several nineteenth century inventions that preview our ‘digital’ age. Braille’s system of raised dots and unraised dots is not unlike the 0s and 1s of computer language. The six dots of the Braille system generate 64 codes. Remarkably, the Braille system is also much simpler than the Morse system – another nineteenth century ‘binary’ invention.
These inventions were early examples of a new way of presenting information i.e. as simple as possible without which we wouldn’t be on this or any other website today. For more, on the history of this stuff I recommend Charles Petzold’s “Code: The hidden language of computer hardware and software”.
One Comment
Trevor, at one level Braille is simple – in that it has an alphabet of 64 6-bit cells. But the way that the cells are allocated to letters, groups of letters and words in the English language is anything but simple. 28 letters are needed to encode the english alphabet, (26 plus the space and the ‘capital sign’), which leaves 36 left over. In the interests of compressing braille text (to make the books small) these 36 are mostly allocated to letter groups, such as ‘ea’ ‘th’, ‘ou’, ‘gh’ and so on. Sounds simple, except these ‘contractions’ may or may not be used depending on what word it is. For example the ‘th’ in ‘lighthouse’ is not contracted. Then we move onto the word signs – ‘and’ ‘for’ ‘of’ ‘the’ ‘with’, a special sign for ‘to’ (same as the exclamation mark) which when used can be joined on to the word it precedes, oh and then the abbreviations: two-cell combinations which stand for special words including biblical terms like ’spirit’. Hopefully enough to give you the picture – English braille is a complex mix of logical rules, arbitrary rules and one-off exceptions. Despite many attempts, a computer program has yet to be written which can convert text to braille with 100% accuracy. Sadly the system is so complex that the majority of blind people (who become blind late in life) are unable to learn it and have to rely on technology such as computer screen readers which have great difficulty with today’s poorly coded web pages.
And can anyone tell me why people bother putting small signs in braille up on the wall next to signs in public places?